10 Awesome Chrome Flags You Should Enable Right Now

Enhance your browsing experience with these experimental features

Image source: Author

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could magically upgrade your browser with features not known to the average Chrome user?

Below are ten Chrome flags that help you to do just that.

Chrome Flags are experimental features that aren’t yet enabled by default. To enable these, see chrome://flags. The flags stated below may be in the pipeline for official release in the near future. However, as of writing, they are still in testing.

Reader Mode

Reader Mode removes unnecessary visual clutter for distraction-free reading — highly important when so many visual elements fight for our attention. Poof, gone.

chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode

Focus Mode

Focus Mode opens the tab in a new framed window, omitting the tab strip and search bar for a cleaner interface.

chrome://flags/#focus-mode

Impulsive-Style Scroll Animations

Rebuilding their Edge platform, Microsoft has brought their natural scrolling motion to Chromium.

“The main idea is that each ‘tick’ of the mouse wheel tries to mimic a physical-based world where content starts moving quickly (an impulse) and then slows due to friction.” — Microsoft

chrome://flags/#impulse-scroll-animations

Tab Groups

Tab Groups is for grouping and managing multiple tabs together, such as for different types of cheese.

chrome://flags/#tab-groups

PDF Two-Up View

PDF Two-Up View is for viewing a PDF with two pages at a time. Interesting.

chrome://flags/#pdf-two-up-view

Force Dark Mode for Web Contents

This forces all websites to render in a dark theme — even those that don’t have one yet, such as Medium. Yes, looking at you, Medium.

chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark

Quieter Notification Permission Prompts

This is a simple feature to reduce permission prompts disrupting your flow.

chrome://flags/#quiet-notification-prompts

Tab Hover Cards

Tab Hover Cards displays the tab previews on hover. It probably comes in handy when you have over 30 tabs open and can’t read the tab titles anymore.

chrome://flags/#tab-hover-cards & chrome://flags/#tab-hover-card-images

Enable Page Sharing via QR Code

This flag allows you to share web pages with QR codes, for easily sending content to your phone. Of course, it comes with the awesome Dino mascot.

Note: As of writing, this only seemed to work on Chrome Canary.

chrome://flags/#sharing-qr-code-generator

Parallel Downloading

Chrome can establish multiple connections to download a single file in parts, resulting in an increase in download speed.

chrome://flags/#enable-parallel-downloading

Conclusion

There are many more Chrome flags that are in testing, and many more features yet to come. If you like to live on the edge, check out Chrome Canary — the bleeding edge of the web.

Thanks for reading.